SF’s Board of Supervisors is poised to miss a crucial deadline set by state officials tasked with reforming the city’s notoriously byzantine zoning laws — and almost no one is talking about it. Why? Probably because terms like ‘housing element certification’ and ‘builder’s remedy’ tend to glaze eyes and slow pulses. But the outcome of the housing policy power struggle between the state and local officials could have major consequences for the city. Here’s what you need to know:

First, for those just tuning in, San Francisco has one of the slowest housing development approval processes in the country. Applicants typically wait between a year-and-a-half to two years to obtain building permits. (These delays may explain why bribery is so rampant in the Department of Building Inspection.) Permissive appeals rules also allow the objections of even one person to delay or stop construction.

Last year, in an effort to reform this system, Governor Newsom’s administration launched an unprecedented review of the city’s housing approval system — and tasked local officials with developing a new plan (or ‘housing element’) outlining their building goals. In January, the city released a preliminary plan outlining a goal of building 82,000 new housing units over the next eight years. State officials approved the plan, Mayor Breed followed up with an executive order outlining zoning reforms necessary to make the building goal possible, and Supe Preston, in typical form, set to work on legislation allowing nonprofits to sue the city if it didn’t meet the goal.